The former Minister for Sport, now Agriculture Minister, Bridget McKenzie took a lurch into the bizarre yesterday.
She suggested her intervention in the Community Sport Infrastructure Program prior to the 2019 federal election was not a case of loading up great stacks of tenderloins, chops, sausages, ham, bacon, hog jowl, pancetta, gammon, Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam before gently easing them into a vast sea of barrels, using a little lard to make it all fit snugly.
No.
Rather, McKenzie said she had been in the business of “reverse pork barrelling”, a previously unknown concept and one that, if you had asked me a week ago, I would have guessed meant an MP calling around to your house to slash your tyres.
While it was not immediately clear what she meant, the evidence presented in what is universally described as a “damning report” from the Australian National Audit Office indicates what was at play was a rough mix of political metaphors: the use of pork barrels to sandbag Coalition marginal seats with the hope of snaffling a few Labor marginals into the bargain.
$100 million worth. A bevy of barrels and pork aplenty.
There is general agreement that this is a disgraceful abuse of taxpayer money. The most important lesson to learn from this is that almost certainly nothing will happen. No one will lose their jobs. The Minister has in fact been promoted into cabinet. There is no sign she will walk the plank and even less that she might be prodded on and then pushed off it.
In fact, Bridget McKenzie was so sublime about it all she suggested the program could be used in like manner again.
“I will continue to use taxpayer funds appropriately and within the guidelines,” she said.
This leads to the delicious prospect of every Australian receiving free shower and toilet facilities courtesy of the Commonwealth provided they’re prepared to move into Coalition held marginals.
Or if you live in or move into a Labor held marginal you could be up for a new swimming pool.
And if the local under-10s soccer club can hang tough for long enough in an electorate with a constant margin of five per cent or less, they could end up playing home games at a purpose built 50,000 seat stadium while the kids playing at the ground in the next suburb have to go behind a tree and tidy themselves up with a Wet One.
How effective the pork barrelling was will always be a matter of speculation. Could it be that without Minister of Sport’s barrelin de porc, the result would have been different? My answer to that and to almost any question you ask about the result of the 2019 election is and always will be, Bill Shorten.
Suffice to say, if you ran your household budget in the same way the Ministry of Sport runs theirs, you’d pop down to the supermarket with a list of staples – bread, butter, milk and juice – only to return home with a bottle of vodka, a haemorrhoid cushion and a toy mobile phone filled with jelly beans.
Some of the more excitable elements of the media have pointed at the legality of the Minister’s intervention as if she might be frog marched away and bail declined.
The issue is the Sports Commission Act states that the final say on funding through this mechanism was left to the board of Sport Australia. Clearly, this did not happen in hundreds of cases.
In other words, if a sporting or community organisation made a request for funding of say, $300,000 but didn’t receive a cracker as they are unfortunate enough to be based in a safe seat (Labor or Coalition held, it doesn’t matter), they may consider sending the decision to the third umpire for review, in this case, the Federal Court.
And the advice I received from a lawyer friend of mine who does enjoy issuing writs, is that this organisation and many like it stand a very good chance of success, should they decide to go down that path. The big difference being the organisation in question is not going to receive the dough by way of oversized presentation cheque over a glass of champers with the local Coalition candidate.
So, $100 million spent of taxpayers’ hard earned spent of questionable social value with a potential liability of millions more in the courts. Well done. Well done, everyone. You’ll find a free basketball court in your next pay packet.
This unseemliness has forced us to fossick around for similar outrages in the past, which come in the form of weird, largely unpronounceable acronyms – the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Regional Australia Development Fund (RDAF), the Howard Government’s Regional Partnership Program (RPP) and the elegantly named Community, Cultural, Recreational and Sporting Facilities Program (CCRFSP) which led to the resignation of Ros Kelly, the Sports Minister in the Keating Government who oversaw what was then a $30 million rort.
They all do it, I hear you cry, and you’d be right. Labor has made pork barrelling an art form, the Libs don’t mess about with the artsy-fartsy stuff, they just send cheques out in the mail. And the Nats, well, pork barrelling is their raison d’etre.
But this is all rather pointless whataboutery. Back in the Hawke, Keating and Howard government days, ministers caught on the fiddle used to simply resign or if they showed any reluctance, metaphorically speaking, to go for a long walk with the company pistol, they were sacked. Now, ministers’ jobs ‘hang by a thread’ only to recover and shuffle on after the storm has blown over.
Actions had consequences back then. All we are about to receive from this scandal is a rough lesson in how far ethics in public office have fallen in this country.
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